What is Power? [PDF]

Part 1 Classical Ideas

What is Power? As indicated in the Introduction the structure of the book is as follows:

Part One

classical ideas (Ch. 1 state, Ch. 2 freedom, Ch. 3 equality, Ch. 4 justice, Ch. 5 democracy, Ch. 6 citizenship, Ch. 7 punishment)

Part Two

classical ideologies (Ch. 8 liberalism, Ch. 9 conservatism, Ch. 10 socialism, Ch. 11 anarchism, Ch. 12 nationalism, Ch. 13 fascism)

Part Three

contemporary ideologies (Ch. 14 feminism, Ch. 15 multiculturalism, Ch. 16 ecologism, Ch. 17 fundamentalism)

Part Four

contemporary ideas (Ch. 18 human rights, Ch. 19 civil disobedience, Ch. 20 political violence, Ch. 21 global justice)

In introducing the concepts of the state, liberty, equality, justice, democracy and citizenship here, we need to find an idea that underpins them all, and indeed, politics in general. In our view, this is power. We are always talking about power. Do ordinary people have any? Do Prime Ministers and Presidents have too much? Do people decline to vote because they feel that they have no power? The question of power inevitably merges into the question of authority. Is might right? Are those who have power entitled to exercise it? When we raise questions like these, we are in fact asking whether power is the same as, or is different from, authority? No one can really dispute the fact that after Operation Iraqi Freedom in Iraq, the US has power, or considerable power in Iraq, but does that mean that it is entitled to exercise this power? The critics of US policy would argue that it lacks authority. Does this mean that it will be frustrated in its exercise of power? It is not difficult to see that when we talk about power and its relation to authority, we are also implicitly raising issues that have a direct bearing on the classical concepts of Part One.

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The Link With Other Concepts The definition of the state that we will adopt is that of the famous German sociologist, Max Weber (1864–1920), who defined the state as an institution claiming a monopoly of legitimate force. How does the notion of ‘legitimate force’ connect to the notion of power? Is the use of force the same as power? We will try to argue that while the two ideas sound similar, in fact power requires compliance, whereas force does not. Of course, it is easy to think of examples where the two come very close to one another. In the proverbial case of the person with a gun who demands your money or life, you have a ‘choice’ in a technical sense, but the ‘power’ exercised involves a threat of credible force, so that in reality your choice is illusory. In this case we would prefer to speak of coercion rather than power. One of the most frequently debated topics is the question of whether force can be legitimate and by legitimacy, we mean force that has been authorized and limited. Clearly a soldier or a member of the police can use force, and usually this force has been authorised by parliament and, therefore, ultimately by those who can vote and hold parliament accountable. Does this make the force legitimate and thus, an act blessed by authority? And if the act of state force is authoritative, in whose eyes does it have authority? Those who are subject to this force (let us say protesters in a demonstration that is deemed to get out of hand), or those who are not part of the demonstration and approve of the action of the police? These are difficult questions, and we introduce them here in order to show why in a discussion of the state, it is important to involve questions of power and its relation to authority. Consider the question of freedom or liberty. We usually think of a person being free if she can exercise power, thus changing herself and her surroundings. But if freedom is defined ‘negatively’, it may simply mean that you are free when no-one deliberately interferes with you. Being free in this case is merely being left alone, not actually exercising power. On the other hand, if freedom is defined ‘positively’, it relates to a person’s capacity to do something, so that, for example, freedom of speech is concerned with the power of a person to speak his mind, not the restrictions that may be placed on some-one’s right to do so. When does a person’s freedom become an act of power that should be accepted or tolerated, and when it should be curbed? Clearly, a person who had no power at all, could not (say) smoke, but should smoking be banned from public places on the grounds that it is a form of power that is harmful? It is impossible to discuss these issues and the famous argument raised by the British liberal thinker, John Stuart Mill (1806–73), without having some kind of idea about power and authority and that is what this chapter 2 of this book sets out to do. Equality and justice rest upon ideas of ‘rightness’. Some people see a conflict between equality and freedom on the grounds that redistributing wealth through high taxation prevents individuals from being rewarded according to their merits. The state has too much power and the individual too little. This, it is argued, undermines the authority of the state: people pay their taxes because they have to, not because they want to. Egalitarians, on the other hand, link equality with justice, and argue that everyone should be treated equally. We should aim to spread power so that one person or group cannot tell another individual or group what to

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do, and governments should implement policies that move in this direction. People have the same rights, and therefore exercise similar power. Bill Gates, the billionaire owner of Microsoft, has rather more power than Josephine Bloggs who cleans his office or Willhelm Peter who removes some of the four million e mails that Bill Gates receives every day. Is this just? Equality and justice rely, as we have already commented, upon the question of rightness, and can it be right that some individuals have so much more power than others? Indeed, one definition of democracy is the ‘power of the people’. Historically, the objection to democracy was precisely that the wrong kind of person would exercise power, and nineteenth century liberals like Lord Macaulay feared that democracy would enable the poor to plunder the rich. On the other hand, left-wing critics of liberal democracy complain that the right of vote does not in itself give a person power to influence the course of events and that material resources must be available to people if they are to exercise power. The authority of liberal democracy rests upon equal rights rather than equal power so that the notion of power is indissolubly tied to debates about democracy. The same is true with the concept of citizenship. Being a citizen gives you power. But does it give you enough? Is the housewife a citizen? She may have the right to vote and stand for parliament, but at the same time she may feel compelled to do what her husband tells her, and have limited power over her own life. Nancy Hartsock, an American academic, wrote a book entitled Money, Sex and power (1985). Yet one of the most central questions in the debate about citizenship is whether the unequal distribution of resources distort the power that people exercise. Are we already citizens or can we only become citizens if resources are more evenly spread both within and between societies? It is not difficult to see why the question of power, how we define it, identify it and analyse it is central to this (as to other) classical political ideas.

Power and Authority: an Indissoluble Link? Power, as defined here, is a social concept. By this we mean that power is concerned with human relations and not with the mere movement of inanimate objects. Power and authority are often contrasted. The police have power (power comes from the barrel of a gun, the former Chinese leader Mao Zedong is supposed to have said) whereas the late Queen Mother in Britain had authority (she inspired love and warmth – at least among some). A simple definition to start with would be to argue that power involves dominating someone or some group, telling them what to do, whereas authority is concerned with the rightness of an action. A person has to be pressured into complying with power, whereas they will obey authority in a voluntary way. Alas, things are not so simple, because power and authority always seem to go together. This problem particularly bothers Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the great French eighteenth century thinker (1712–78). On the one hand, might can never be transformed into right, since ‘force is a physical power; I do not see how its effects could produce morality’ (1968: 52). On the other hand, Rousseau famously insists

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that people must obey the law. The social contract would be worthless unless it could ensure that those who refuse to abide by the general will must be constrained to do so. Dissenters must, in that most celebrated of phrases, be ‘forced to be free’ (1968: 64). (For more on Rousseau’s ideas on power and authority, see pp. xx-xx) Power and authority contradict each other, and yet there is an indissoluble link between them. Our problem can be presented in a diagram as follows: Power implies

Authority implies

constraint force subordination dependence

consent morality will autonomy

This is the problem of the ‘two levels’. Power and authority appear to exclude one another, but they are never found apart.

Does a Broad View of Politics Help? It might be argued that the problem of power and its relationship to authority is not a serious one. All we need to do is to point to a state that rests purely on power, and one that rests solely upon authority, and the problem is solved! But April Carter in her Authority and Democracy concedes that in the political sphere, ‘authority rarely exists in its pure form’, and she says that even a constitutional government acting with great liberalism, would still lack ‘pure authority’ since, as she puts it, such a government ‘relies ultimately upon coercion’ (1979: 41; 33). Political authority (defined in statist terms) is paradoxical – a contradiction in terms – since no state, however benevolent, can wholly abstain from the use of force. Pure authority turns out to be a pure abstraction, at least as far as politics is concerned, and Carter demonstrates that rigorous definition and common sense cannot avoid the problem of paradox. Power and authority may be mutually exclusive, but it seems impossible to effect a clean divorce. This is why Barbara Goodwin in her Using Political Ideas (1997) argues that the attempt to distinguish rigorously between power and authority is ‘doomed to failure. In any normal political situation, and in every state institution, they coexist and support each other’ (1997: 314). It might be objected that politics is far broader than the state, and involves social relations between individuals. Surely here, at least, we can find a sharp separation between power and authority. Taylor who is interested in anthropological material on stateless societies, argues that a society without any form of coercion, is ‘conceivable’ (1982: 25), and the New Left theorist, C.B. Macpherson (1911–87), takes the view that in a simple market model in which every household has enough either to produce goods and services for itself or to exchange with others, then we have an example of cooperation without coercion – or in our terminology, authority without power. But it could be objected that the market mechanism constrains and Marx argues

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under capitalism, ‘the dull compulsion of economic relations’ subordinates the labourer to the capitalist (1970: 737). Even the independent producers of commodities suffer what Marx calls ‘the coercion exerted by the presence of their mutual interests’ (1970: 356). But what about social examples that not only avoid the state, but do not involve the market either? What of the relationship between parent and child, teacher and student, doctor and patient? Are these not spheres in which we can (although do not always) witness the kind of respect that is essential for authority but which excludes power? However, J.S. Mill raises a problem that calls this analysis into question. In On Liberty Mill champions the right of the individual to think and act freely. In his argument he contrasts the physical force of the state to what he calls ‘the moral coercion of public opinion’ (1974: 68). Morality itself is seen as constraining, and we would contend that the very notion of a relationship subverts the idea that power and authority can be spliced apart. If all relationships are governed by norms (i.e. morality) of some kind, how then can any relationships be free from pressures of a constraining kind?

Negative and Positive Power We have assumed that power and authority are contrasting concepts. But a distinction is often made between power as a negative and power as a positive concept. This, as we will see, has important implications for the concept of authority. Power is negative in the sense that it relates to my ability to get you to do things that you otherwise would not do. The negative view of power is associated with the liberal tradition, and centres around the capacity of the individual to act freely and take responsibility for their actions. It is a notion deeply rooted in our culture, and, in our view, forms a necessary part of any analysis of power. People who exercise power, can and should be punished (or helped) when they exercise this power in ways which harm others or, indeed, irreversibly harm themselves. By this latter point, we mean a situation in which people can’t change their minds because, as with serious self-abuse, or taking addictive drugs, it is too late! This notion emphasizes the differences between people and their conflict of interests. Each individual is separate, and we are all capable of exercising negative power. In contrast, power is deemed positive when it is expressed as empowerment. Empowerment occurs when one person helps (‘empowers’) themselves or another, or when a group or community enables people to develop. Contrary to what people may think, the notion of power as negative is a modern one while the ancients took the view that power was always expressed positively within communities. The idea of power being exercised to strengthen our relations with others, is a very old one. Positive power is seen as the ability to do things by the discovery of our own strength – a capacity – a power to – as opposed to negative power which is seen as a power over – a domination. The conventional view sees power in negative terms, linked to the state, and force or the threat of force. Elshtain distinguishes between potestas – which relates to control, supremacy, domination, and potential – which

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relates to ability, efficacy and potency, especially that which is ‘unofficial and sinister’ (Elshtain, 1992: 117). How ever we distinguish them, it is impossible to separate negative and positive power in an empirical sense. It is clear from Lukes’s commentary, that positive power broadly corresponds to what has sometimes been called authority, and negative power expresses the conventional view of power. Defining power in a way which separates out logically the negative from the positive, does not resolve the power/authority problem, and like power and authority, negative and positive power always go together. It is impossible to think of a relationship in which one exists without the other.

Negative and Positive Power as a Relationship The reason why negative and positive power cannot be divorced is that all relationships contain both. It is true that earlier notions of power were predominantly positive in character, but the problem, historically, is that this power has in practice been repressively hierarchical: the power of fathers, of lords, of priests, of kings. Positive power has been exercised in the past by people who claim (somewhat implausibly) to be acting on behalf of everyone else – men acting on behalf of women and children, lords for their serfs, priests for parishioners, sovereigns for subjects. As liberals rightly object, ‘negative power’ is smuggled in through the back door. The holders of positive power see themselves as chastizing others for their own good. The master may imagine that he is acting in the slave’s interests – but when the slave is thought of as an individual, then things seem rather different! power must be both positive and negative. It is important that we do not reject the individual focus of negative power, but seek to build upon it. We must come up with the proposition that if I am to exercise power as an individual, then I must allow you to exercise power as an individual. In other words, to sustain negative power, it must be exercised in terms of a relationship – or positively – so that I exercise power in a way that enables you to exercise power. Power implies mutuality – but it can only mutual if it is both positive and negative. If it is positive ‘on its own’, as it were, it stresses unity at the expense of separation, the community at the expense of the individual, so that (as liberals suspect), it becomes oppressive and hypocritical. Positive power exercised ‘on its own’ is as one sided as negative power when the latter conceived in an abstract manner, because when negative power is exercised on its own, separation is expressed at the expense of unity. One individual exercises power in a way that prevents another from doing the same. If the notion of ‘negative’ power is crucial for a person’s freedom and individuality, it is not enough. ‘On its own’, it presents power in what is sometimes called a ‘zero sum game’ i.e. I have power because you don’t. I exercise power over you – if I win, you lose. I am separate from you, and therefore my power differentiates me from you. Normally when people think of power, they think of power in negative terms. Why is this notion a problem? It assumes – as its classical liberal roots reveal – that individuals can exist in complete isolation from other individuals, whereas in fact as any parent can tell you, we only acquire our sense of individuality (and thus

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separateness) in conjunction with others. Logically, if each person is to exercise power, then this negative power must take account of the right of each individual to be the same as everyone else. In other words, power can only be consistently ‘negative’ if it is also has a social, positive and what we want to call a ‘relational’ attribute.

Three Dimensional Power and the Problem of Power and Authority Lukes argues that that power can be divided into three dimensions. The onedimensional view identifies power as decision-making, the two-dimensional view argues that power can be exercised beyond the decision-making forum as in a situation where certain issues are excluded from an agenda and people feel that their interests are not being met. Three-dimensional power arises when people express preferences that are variance with the interests: they support a system through a consciousness that is ‘false’. Lukes’ argument is that the first dimension is highly superficial. He is sharply critical of Dahl’s defence of power as decision-making in Who Governs (1961) on the grounds that those taking decisions, may not exercise decisive power at all. The second dimension is an improvement but still confines itself to observable activity: we have to be able to show that groups outside the decision-making forum are consciously exercising power, while three-dimensional power is deemed the most subtle of all. People do not protest precisely because they are victims of a power system that creates a phoney consensus, and those exercising power (like the media or educational system) may do so unintentionally. An example of threedimensional power could be taken to be the Great Leap Forward in China that was supported by many who believed that through their heroic will power the arrival of a communist society would be hastened. They certainly did not want the famine that followed. But how can Lukes prove the existence of a ‘latent’ conflict, a potential event and a non-existing decision? How can he demonstrate an exercise of power when nothing takes place? The gulf between interests and preferences can, it seems, be demonstrated if it can be shown that with more information, people’s preferences would have changed, and that interests only come into line with preferences when no further unit of information would cause any further change. Lukes has indicated that at least under some circumstances (for example where partial information leads to people in the town of Gary, Indiana not campaigning for an air pollution ordinance), power can be exercised which appears authoritative. Power and authority seem to go together but in fact the authority is an illusion. Power is being exercised all along. But has this really resolved the power/authority problem? It certainly points to the way in which unintended circumstances pressure people to do things they otherwise would not have done. But the fact is that the separation remains because when power is expressed in a situation without observable conflict, the authority is simply a propagandist illusion – an idealized mystification of the reality of power. Indeed, Lukes seems to be saying that where people are fully informed, there is authority; where information is blocked even unintentionally, there is power. The problem is still not resolved.

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Accounting for the ‘Indissoluble Link’ Long after liberals rejected the notion of a state of nature in which individuals live in splendid isolation from one another, they continue to write as though individuals can be conceived in the absence of relationships through which they in fact discover their identity. Constraint is unavoidable since no agent can exist except through a structure: these structures are both natural and social. You have to obey the laws of gravity and you have relationships with your family and friends whether you like it or not. Constraint should not be confused with force, although classical liberals and anarchists use the terms as though they were synonyms. Although we know of many societies that were or (in the case of international society) are, stateless in character, we know of no society in which there is an absence of constraint. Consensus arises when people can ‘change places’ and show empathy with one another’s point of view, and this necessarily involves constraining pressures. Force, on the other hand, disrupts consensus and relationships, since when force is used, the other party ceases to be a person, and becomes a ‘thing’. To see how this translates into the argument about power and authority, the following chart can be drawn up:

Power

Authority

Necessity Circumstances Negative power Pressure Constraint

Freedom Rational consciousness Positive power Will Autonomy

All relationships involve constraints (power) and entitlements (authority). Remove one side of the power/authority equation, and the other crumbles. Take two diametrically opposed examples by way of illustration. In a master/slave relationship, power is obvious and manifest. Not only are there constraints, but there is also a threat of credible force. But at the same time unless slaves (however reluctantly or under whatever duress) ‘acknowledge’ or ‘accept’ their slavery, then the relationship between them and their masters is impossible, and they will die or escape. Relationships are mutual: being a slave obviously limits your freedom, but so too does having one even if in one case, the constraint causes pain and in the other, pleasure. To put the point in extremis: slave owners who simply kill their slaves or fail to keep them in service, destroy the basis of their own power. Even the slave, in other words, makes some input in this most repressive of relationships, and it is this input that gives the relationship its (minimally) authoritative character. In this case, we would want to say that slave owners exercise ‘much’ power and ‘little’ authority. Let us turn to a relationship at the other end of the political spectrum, that between doctor and patient (or if you prefer, between teacher/pupil; priest/

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parishioner, etc.). In this case, it seems that only authority exists, and there is no power. People normally go to the doctor because they want to, and if they accept the advice offered, it is because there is a communication of a persuasive or potentially persuasive kind. Authority predominates, but power also exists. Doctors communicate with their patients by pointing to constraints. If the advice they offer is not taken, highly unpleasant circumstances will follow! In these circumstances a person may have as much or as little freedom to choose as in a situation where they are threatened with force, since what choice does a chronically ill person have when told of the need for a dangerous operation, if the alternative is a swift and certain death? In this case, we have a relationship in which there is ‘much’ authority, but there is by no means a complete absence of power. What has to be excluded from power and authority is the use of force itself, since this makes compliance impossible and is therefore a violation not merely of authority, but of power as well. Obviously the more authority predominates, the better, but even a purely consensual relation involves some element of constraint. Let us conclude by giving an example of a member of the police seeking to persuade football supporters who have been unable to obtain tickets, to go home. Initially, mild pressures would be invoked: ‘it would be a good idea not to hang around but go home’. If this does not work, something stronger might be tried like: ‘I would like you to go home – it would be silly not to’. If this does not work, a command follows: ‘I am ordering you to go home’. Then – a threat: ‘if you don’t go home, I will arrest you’ and black marias around the corner are indicated. If the police authority has to actually seize the protester, then force is used and both power and authority have failed! But the point is that even in the most authoritative statement, power is also implied, and in the sternest expression of power, authority is also present. The two always go together, and unless they are linked, no relationship is possible. There is therefore a difference between what are conventionally called democratic and authoritarian states. The latter rely far more upon power and the former have much more authority. But the two concepts always go together, even though they are different, and it is a sobering thought that for those subject to force, neither power nor authority can be said to exist. Power is not merely a crucial but the central concept of politics. It underpins, as we have tried to show, the other ideas that are elaborated in Part One and hence it deserves a separate (and fairly extended) treatment of its own by way of prefacing this section of the book.

References Bachrach, P. and Baratz, M. (1969) ‘Decisions and Non-Decisions: an Analytical Framework’ in R. Bell et al. (eds.) Political power New York and London: The Free Press and Collier-Macmillan, 100–9. Carter, A. (1979) Authority and Democracy London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Dahl, R. (1961) Who Governs? New Haven: Yale University. Elshtain, J. (1992) ‘The power and powerlessness of Women’ in G. Bock and S. James, eds., Beyond Equality and Difference London and New York: Routlege, 110–125.

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Goodwin, B. (1997) Using Political Ideas 4th edition. Chichester and New York, et al.: John Wiley and Sons. Hobbes, T. (1968) The Leviathan Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hoffman, J. (1988) State, Power and Democracy Brighton: Wheatsheaf. Lukes, S. (2005) Power: A Radical View 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Macpherson, C.B. (1973) Democratic Theory Oxford: Clarendon. Marx, K. (1970) Capital, vol. 1 London: Lawrence and Wishart. Mill, J.S. (1974) On Liberty, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Plato, (1955) The Republic Harmondsworth: Penguin. Rousseau, J.-J. (1968) The Social Contract Harmondsworth: Penguin. Taylor, M. (1982) Community, Anarchy and Liberty Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 1

The State Introduction If you asked the average person to identify the state, they may look at you in astonishment, and say that they were not aware of living under a state, unless by that you meant the ‘government’. Indeed, some writers have spoken of Britain and the USA as stateless societies, although this is to confuse what people think about the state, and what the state really is. In tackling this question, we shall also try to deal with the problem: does the state really exist?

Chapter Map • The history of the concept of the state so as to decide whether the state is purely modern; • Various definitions of the state, and our own definition;

• The link between the state and conventional notions of sovereignty; and • The argument that holds that it is possible to look beyond the state, provided certain conceptual distinctions are put in place.

Margaret Thatcher and the State

Margaret Thatcher, British Prime Minister, 1979-90 Source: © Bettmann/CORBIS

hatcher was British Prime Minister between 1979 and 1990 and during her period of office, she introduced dramatic changes to the British political landscape. She sold off council houses, introduced ‘reforms’ into the trade union movement (particularly with regard to the election of leaders), reduced welfare benefits and preferred private to public transport, championing the interests of what she called the individual against the interests of what she saw as established institutions, included among which was the civil service. All this was presented in a famous phrase that was invoked during her period of office, ‘getting the state off the backs of the people’. Thatcher was seen by her critics as an oldfashioned liberal. She expressed scepticism about the existence of society as a force that

T

stands above the individual, she was a passionate free marketeer and she knighted Frederick Hayek who challenged the consensus support for the economist, John Maynard Keynes, in the 1950s and 60s. The aspect of the state that she opposed was the ‘welfare state’. Her policies certainly weakened welfare provisions, and she argued passionately that welfare state ‘handouts’ undermined the independence of the individual. But what of the coercive dimensions of the state? She strengthened the police (increasing their pay), built more prisons and the military victory over Argentina in the Falklands War boosted the prestige of the armed forces and led to a strong revival of patriotism. Her suspicious attitude towards ‘aliens’ and multiculturalism took the form of a potent English nationalism and lack of enthusiasm for the European Union. If she was a liberal, she was a conservative liberal who appointed hereditary peers to the House of Lords and opposed the African National Congress of South Africa. Her period of office raises sharply the question of the nature of the state. If the state is defined in terms of its welfare aspects, then she was certainly anti-statist, but if we stress the link between the state and force, then she strengthened rather than weakened the state. Moreover, critics saw her as a great centraliser, establishing rule through appointed committees (called quangos) and using the state’s interventionist power to engineer denationalisation on favourable terms to private investors. Thomas Hobbes, a seventeenth-century champion of state sovereignty, was reputedly her favourite philosopher. 1. Do you see Thatcher as a Tory or a liberal? 2. Is the state an institution that is more concerned with providing welfare for citizens than resorting to force? 3. It is sometimes said that Thatcher sought to establish a strong state and free economy. Do you agree? 4. How would you interpret the slogan of ‘getting the state off the backs of the people’?

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How Modern is the Concept of the State? The question of what the state is is linked to the question of when the state emerges historically. T.H. Green (a nineteenth-century British political philosopher) believed that states have always existed. Families and tribes require an ideal of what is right, and this ethical system is the basis of the state (1941). Hegel (who was a nineteenth-century German philosopher) took the view that tribal societies had neither states nor history. Lacking Reason, these stateless societies cannot even be understood (1956: 61). More common, however, is the argument that the state is a modern institution since its ‘forms’ are as important as its ‘content’. The state, in one account, is defined in terms of five attributes (Dunleavy and O’Leary, 1987: 2). 1. A public institution separated from the private activities of society. In ancient Greek society, the polis (wrongly called, Dunleavy and O’Leary argue, the city state) did not separate the individual from the state, and in a feudal society kings and their vassals were bound by oaths of loyalty that were both public and private. Certain sections of society, like the clergy, had special immunities and privileges, so that there was no sharp separation between members of society, on the one hand, and the polity on the other. 2. The existence of sovereignty in unitary form. In a feudal society, for example, the clergy, the nobility, the particular ‘estates’ and ‘guilds’ (merchants, craftsmen, artisans, etc.) had their particular courts and rules, so that the only loyalty which went beyond local attachments, was to the Universal Church, and in Europe this was divided between Pope and Emperor. Laws confirmed customs and social values – they were not made by a particular body that represented citizens and expressed a united ‘will’. 3. The application of laws to all who live in a particular society. In the ancient Greek polis, protection was only extended to citizens, not slaves, and even a stranger required patronage from a citizen to claim this protection. Under feudalism, protection required loyalty to a particular lord. It did not arise from living in a territory, and the ruling political system could not administer all the inhabitants. 4. The recruitment of personnel according to bureaucratic as opposed to patrimonial criteria. Whereas the state selects people for an office according to impersonal attributes (are they well qualified etc.?), earlier polities identified the office-holder with the job, so that offices belonged to particular individuals and could be handed to relatives or friends at the discretion of the office holder. Imagine the Vice-Chancellor of a university deciding to name their own successor! 5. The capacity to extract revenue (tax) from a subject population. In pre-modern polities, problems of transport and communication meant that tax-raising power was limited, and rural communities in particular were left to their own devices. The argument is that only the state is sovereign, separate from society, can protect all who dwell within its clearly demarcated boundaries, recruits personnel according to bureaucratic criteria and can tax effectively. These are seen not merely as the features of a modern state, but of the state itself. We will later challenge this argument but it is very widely held.

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Defining the State

The Force Argument Definitions of the state vary depending upon whether the question of force or morality is stressed, or a combination of both. The definition that commands a good deal of support is that of the German sociologist, Max Weber (see his biography on the website) – that the state is an institution that claims a monopoly of legitimate violence for a particular territory. Robert Dahl, a US political scientist who taught at Yale, defines Government (with a capital ‘G’ – a term which he uses synonymously with the state) in terms explicitly taken from Weber. David Easton, on the other hand, criticises an anthropologist for focusing on organised force as the distinguishing quality of political systems, and identifies this emphasis upon force with the position laid down by Thomas Hobbes (see his biography on the website) and reinforced by Weber (Hoffman, 1995: 34). Marx highly appraised Hobbes as a theorist who saw ‘might’ rather than will as the basis of right or the state (1976: 329) and force has been seen as the most important of the factors that accounts for the state. It is true that it is not the only one, and supporters of the force definition of the state acknowledge that other factors come into play. Marx called these ‘symptoms’ (1976: 329), and Weber himself specifically stated that force is not the only attribute of the state. Indeed his definition makes it clear that the force of the state has to be ‘legitimate’, monopolised and focused on a particular territory. Nevertheless, as Weber himself says, force is a ‘means specific to the state’ (Gerth and Wright Mills, 1991: 78, 134). The other factors are important but secondary. Force is central to the state, its most essential attribute.

The Centrality of Will Those who see morality or right as the heart of the state, are often called ‘idealists’ because they consider ‘ideas’ rather than material entities to be central to reality. Hegel, perhaps the most famous of the idealist thinkers, described the state as the realization of morality – the ‘Divine Idea as it exists on Earth’ (Hegel, 1956: 34). T. H. Green argued that singling out what he called ‘supreme coercive power’ as the essential attribute of the state, undermines the important role which morality plays in securing a community’s interests (1941: 121). Green supports the argument of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an eighteenth-century French writer. Rousseau took the view that morality, rights and duty form the basis of the state. Green does not deny that what he calls ‘supreme coercive power’ is involved in the state, but he insists that central to the state are the moral ends for which this power is exercised. This led Green’s editor to sum up his argument with the dictum that ‘will, not force, is the basis of the state’ (Hoffman, 1995: 218–19). More recently, writers like Hamlin and Petit have argued that the state is best defined in terms of a system of rules which embody a system of rights – this is crucial to what they call a ‘normative analysis of the state’ (1989: 2).

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The State as a Mixture of Will and Force Others argue that the state does not have a ‘basis’ or central attribute, but is a mixture of both force and morality. It is wrong to regard one of these as more important than the other. Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist, traced this view of the state back to Machiavelli’s The Prince. Machiavelli, writing in the sixteenth century, declared that there are two means of fighting: ‘one according to the laws, the other with force; the first way is proper to man, the second to beasts’. Machiavelli argued that the first is often not sufficient to maintain power, so that ‘it becomes necessary to have recourse to the second’ (1998: 58). The state was seen as analogous to the mythical creature, the centaur, which was half-human and half-beast. Gramsci embraced this argument. The state is linked to force, he said, but equally important is law, morality and right (Gramsci, 1971: 170). The state in this argument has a dual character, and although Gramsci subscribed to the Marxist argument that the state would wither away, he argues that what disappears is force, and an ‘ethical state’ remains (Hoffman, 1996: 72). It has become very common to contend that theories that argue that the essential property of the state is either morality or force are ‘essentialist’ or ‘reductionist’. By this is meant an approach that highlights one factor as being crucially relevant. Just as it is wrong to ignore the part of the state which imposes force upon those who will not voluntarily comply with the law, so it is wrong to downgrade the ‘civilising’ aspects of the state – the aspects of the state which regulate peoples’ lives in ways which make them healthier and happier. The notion of a welfare state captures this amalgam, since it is argued that the state acts in a way that is both negative and positive – a mixture of force and will. Your local hospital is part of the National Health Service and funded from taxes that people have to pay, but the staff there are trained to help you with healthcare. The hospital is part of a state that is both negative and positive in its role.

Force and the Modernity Argument Those who stress the centrality of force argue that the state is far older than the ‘modernists’ assume. It is true that earlier states are different from modern ones and lack the features described by Dunleavy and O’Leary. Force is regarded as the defining attribute of the state. Feudal and ancient polities may have been more partisan and less effective than the modern state, but they were states nevertheless. They sought to impose supreme power over their subjects. We come back to Weber’s definition of the state as an institution that claims a monopoly of legitimate force for a particular territory. Does this mean that only the modern state is really a state, or do all post-tribal polities act in this way (albeit less efficiently and more chaotically), and therefore deserve to be called states as well? Proponents of the force argument contend that differences in form should not be allowed to exclude similarities. Once we argue that only modern states can be

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Exercise List the features that make the state modern. Are these features enough to bolster the argument that the modern state is the state, and that earlier polities should not be called states at all? T. H. Green called the Tsarist state a state by courtesy (1941: 137). What would you call the following states? • Iraq under Saddam Hussein • (Contemporary) Yugoslavia • Apartheid South Africa • USA • Afghanistan Make two columns, one headed ‘Difference in Degree’, the other ‘Difference in Kind’. Now list the features that differentiate modern states from pre-modern states, or the state from earlier (but post-tribal) polities under what you see as the appropriate column.

called states, we ignore the problem of defining totalitarian states (like Iraq under Saddam Hussein). Are they not states because they are corrupt and violate in all sorts of ways bureaucratic criteria for recruiting functionaries and the public/ private distinction, as elaborated above? The danger with the ‘modernist argument’ (as we call it) is twofold. It assumes that states have to be liberal in character, and that modern states live up to the forms which are prescribed for them. Yet even liberal states that consider themselves democratic do not always practise what they preach. They are also are plagued with corruption (think of the role played by money in the election process in the USA) so that criteria for appointments are violated and the rule of law is breached. Is the Italian state not a ‘real’ state, for example, because it fails to live up to the ‘ideals’ of the state? If it is not a state, then what is it? It would be much better to identify states in terms of the supreme force that they exercise (albeit in different ways) over subjects. Weber’s definition applies to all (post tribal) polities for roughly the last 5,000 years.

The Argument Against the Concept of the State Three bodies of argument contend that the state is not a suitable concept for political theory, since it is impossible to define it. The state has been described as one of the most problematic concepts in politics (Vincent, 1987: 3) and it has been seen as so problematic as to defy definition at all.

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The Behaviouralist Argument The first group to subscribe to what might be called the ‘indefinability thesis’ was developed by political scientists who worked in the United States in the 1960s but whose influence was not confined to the USA. It extended throughout Europe. This group is generally known as the behaviouralists. The founding father of behaviouralism is considered to be Arthur Bentley, who argued that the state was afflicted with what he called in 1908 ‘soul stuff’ – an abstract and mystical belief that the state somehow represents the ‘whole’ of a community. Much better, Bentley argued, to adopt a process view of politics that contends that the state is no more than one government among many (1967: 263). The term ‘behaviour’ was intended to capture the fact that humans, like animals, behave: hence the approach denied that human society is different in kind from animal society or the activity of other elements in nature. This led to a view that the study of politics was like a natural science, and behaviouralists argued that as a science, it must not make value judgements. Just as biologists would not describe a queen bee as ‘reactionary’ or ‘autocratic’ so the political scientist must abstain from judgements in analysing the material they study. Behaviouralists believe that a science of politics should not defend particular values, and should instead draw up testable hypotheses by objectively studying political behaviour.

The Argument of David Easton David Easton was a leading figure of the behavioural political scientists who examined the theoretical credentials of the state in his book The Political System (1953). He argues that the state is a hopelessly ambiguous term. Political scientists cannot agree on what the state is or when it arose. Some define the state in terms of its morality, others see it as an instrument of exploitation. Some regard it as an aspect of society, others as a synonym for government, while still others identify it as a unique and separate association that stands apart from social institutions like churches and trade unions. Some point to its sovereignty, others to its limited power. What makes the state so contentious, Easton argues, is that the term is imbued with strong mythical qualities, serving as an ideological vehicle for propagating national sovereignty against cosmopolitan and local powers. Given this degree of contention and controversy, there is no point, Easton argues, in adding a ‘definition of my own’ (1971: 106–15). If political theory is to be scientific, then it must be clear, and clarity requires that we abstain from using the concept of the state altogether. For around three decades after the Second World War the state, conceptually at any rate, appeared in the words of one writer to have ‘withered away’ (Mann, 1980: 296). Yet in 1981 Easton commented that a concept which ‘many of us thought had been polished off a quarter of a century ago, has now risen from the grave to haunt us once again’ (1981: 303). What had brought the state back into political science? Easton noted: • the revival of interest in Marxism, which places the state at the heart of politics;

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• a conservative yearning for stability and authority; a rediscovery of the importance of the market so that the state is important as an institution to be avoided (see case study); • a study of policy which found the state to be a convenient tool of analysis. Easton is however still convinced that the state is not a viable concept in political science. He recalls the numerous definitions that he had noted in 1953, and argues that ‘irresolvable ambiguities’ have continued to proliferate since then. To make his point, he engages in a hard-hitting and witty analysis of the work of a Greek Marxist, Nicos Poulantzas (who was much influenced by the French theorist, Louis Althusser). Poulantzas, Easton tell us, concludes after much detailed and almost impenetrable analysis, that the state is an ‘indecipherable mystery’. The state is ‘the eternally elusive Pimpernel of Poulantzas’s theory’ – an ‘undefined and undefinable essence’ (Easton, 1981: 308). All this confirms Easton’s view that the concept of the state is obscure, empty and hopelessly ambiguous. It should be abandoned by political science.

David Easton’s Concept of the Political System If the concept of the state should be pushed to one side by political theorists, what do we put in its place? Easton argues that at the heart of our study of politics lies not the idea of the state, but rather the concept of the political system. This Easton defines as ‘the authoritative allocation of values for society as a whole’ (1971: 134). Politics, he contends, is far better defined in this way. Such a definition avoids the ambiguity of the state-concept, but at the same time, it is not so broad that it considers all social activity to be political. After all, a political system refers to the allocation of values for society as a whole. It, therefore, confines the term ‘political’ to public matters, so that, as far as Easton is concerned, the pursuit of power that may take place in trade unions, churches, families and the like is not part of politics itself. The notion of a political system makes it possible to sharply differentiate the political from the social. It also resolves historical problems that afflict the concept of the state. Whereas the state only arose in the seventeenth century (in Easton’s ‘modernist’ view), the concept of the political system can embrace politics as a process existing not only in medieval and ancient times, but in tribal societies which had no significant concentrations of power at all. Once we free politics from the state, we can also talk about a political system existing at the international level, authoritatively allocating values for the global community. In his later work, Easton contends that a political system can persist through change so that one could argue that a system continues to allocate values authoritatively while its structures change dramatically. Thus it could be said, for example, that a political system persisted in Germany while the imperial order fell to the Weimar republic, which yielded to the Nazi regime that was replaced by a very different order after the Second World War (Easton, 1965: 83). Easton’s concept of the political system is, he claims, superior to the concept of the state. The latter is ambiguous, limited and ideological. Even though Robert Dahl is critical (as we will see) of Easton’s particular definition, he too prefers to

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speak of a ‘political system’ which can exist at many levels, and which he defines as any persistent pattern of human relationships involving to a significant extent, control, influence, power or authority (1976: 3).

The Linguistic and Radical Argument The linguistic analysts were a philosophical school fashionable in the 1950s and 1960s in Britain and the USA. Their doyen, T.D. Weldon, wrote an extremely influential book, The Vocabulary of Politics, in 1953 in which he argued that analysts are only competent to tackle what linguistic analysts called ‘second order’ problems. This referred to the words politicians use, and not the realities to which these words are supposed to refer. The concept of the state is (Weldon argued) a hopelessly muddled term, frequently invested with dangerously misleading mystical overtones. Practical political activists use it but it is an unphilosophical ‘first order’ term that has imported into political theory its confusions from the world of practice. Whereas we all know (as citizens) that the USA and Switzerland are states whereas Surrey and the United Nations are not, the term has no interest for political philosophers (1953: 47–9). We refer to the radical argument as one that is in favour of radical democracy and sees the concept of the state as a barrier to this end. Why conceive of politics in statist terms when we want people at all levels of society to participate in running their own affairs? Radicals come in many forms. Some see the term guilty of a kind of monopolisation of politics, so that political activity outside the state is downgraded. Others argue that the term is so complex that it is fruitless to try and define it. Richard Ashley, a postmodernist or poststructuralist in international relations, takes the view that it is impossible to ‘decide what the state is’ (1988: 249), while Pringle and Watson quote the words of the French postmodernist,

Focus

Behaviouralism Not to be confused with behaviourism – a psychological theory – behaviouralism developed in the USA after the Second World War as an intellectual concept that stressed precision, systems theory and pure science. The idea is that all living things behave in regular ways and it is possible to see them as adjusting to their environment as a result of the inputs they receive and the outputs they produce. Generalisations can be made that can be verified through methods that have no ethical implications. Theory must be scientific in the sense that no values are involved, and the social sciences do not involve any special approaches that are not relevant to the natural sciences. Indeed, the notion of behaviour makes it possible to examine all living things since humans express themselves through regularities which can be scientifically investigated. The behavioural ‘revolution’ (as its supporters called it) reached its height in the 1960s, but was accused of taking the politics out of politics by its critics who felt that the methods of natural science were not appropriate to the social sciences, and that the notion anyway that science could be value-free, is naive and superficial.

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Michel Foucault, that ‘to place the state above or outside society is to focus on a homogeneity which is not there’ (1992: 55). The state, says Foucault, is ‘a mythical abstraction whose importance is a lot more limited than many of us think’ (Hoffman, 1995: 162). Pringle and Watson, for their part, find the state too erratic and disconnected to evoke as an entity (1992: 63), while a feminist, Judith Allen, takes the view that the state is too abstract, unitary and unspecific to be of use in addressing the disaggregated, diverse, specific or local sites which require feminist attention (Allen, 1990: 22). The radicals agree with the linguistic analysts and the behaviouralists that the concept of the state should be abandoned. Their particular argument is that the notion discourages participation and involvement at local levels and in social institutions, and is therefore an unhelpful term.

Problems with the Argument Against the State Many of the points that the critics of the concept of the state make are useful. It is certainly odd to identify politics with the state and, therefore, to take the view that families, tribes, voluntary organisations from cricket clubs to churches and universities, and international institutions are not political because the state is either not involved at all or at least directly at any rate, in running their affairs. However, it does not follow from this that we cannot define the state, or that the state is not an important concept and institution for political scientists to study. Indeed, we will argue that it is impossible to ignore the state, and that unless one can contend that the state no longer exists, it can and must be defined.

The Argument of David Easton At no point does Easton suggest that the state does not exist, and Dahl, his fellow behaviouralist, speaks explicitly of the state as ‘the Government’ (1976: 10). In a more recent book, Easton identifies with those who argue that the state has never really been left out (1990: 299n). Nevertheless, we must consider Easton’s argument that the concept of the political system is a much clearer and more flexible idea than the concept of the state. Easton’s notion might seem ingenious but in fact it has serious difficulties of its own. Easton’s argument is that when we define a political system as the authoritative allocation of values for society as a whole, we can say that the conflict within a tribe which leads to secession of one of its clans is ‘exactly similar’ to conflicts between states in international institutions (1971: 111). But what is the meaning of ‘society as a whole’? Easton defines society as a ‘special kind of human grouping’ in which people develop ‘a sense of belonging together’ (1971: 135). When secession occurs within a tribe or war between states takes place, there would seem to be the absence, not the presence, of that sense of belonging together which Easton defines as a society. To say that tribes and international orders which involved warring states, are ‘genuine societies’ (1971: 141) seems to empty the term society of any content. The

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same problem afflicts his argument that a political system can persist through change even though (in the case of Germany, for example) the authorities and the regimes not only change drastically, but are divided until 1991 into two warring halves! The political system appears to be a shadowy abstraction that could only perish if all popular participants were physically obliterated. It could be argued that Easton’s ‘political system’ seems no less mysterious than (the target of his 1971 article) Poulantzas’s elusive state. In later definitions, Easton speaks of the political system not as a ‘something’ that authoritatively allocates values for society as a whole, but as that which takes decisions ‘considered binding by most members of society, most of the time’ (1990: 3). But this does not solve his problem. Indeed, in an early review of The Political System, Dahl raises the problem of Easton’s definition, by asking how many have to obey before an ‘allocation’ is deemed binding. Criminals, as Dahl points out, do not believe that criminal statutes must be obeyed (Hoffman, 1995: 28). The point is a good one, and it is not answered by saying that most of the members of society, most of the time have to consider allocations binding. What happens if the order is an authoritarian one in which relatively few people support the regime? Moreover, what counts as genuine support as opposed to compliance based upon fear? Think of ‘popular support’ in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia or in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. How useful is it to say that people considered the allocations binding? This is a real problem, and what it shows is that Easton has not done away with the ambiguities and elusiveness that characterise the state. Indeed, it has been argued that Easton can only bring his political system down to earth by making it synonymous with the state, so that we can give some kind of empirical purchase to the notion of society as a whole. Once we return to the state, the problems of ambiguity and abstractness remain. The substitute of the political system for the state has not solved any of the problems that led Easton to reject the concept of the state in the first place.

The Question of Existence Moreover, Easton’s argument suffers from the same difficulty that confronts all who argue that the state cannot be defined. We have to ask: does the state exist? None of the critics of the concept of the state suggest that the state as a real-life institution has disappeared. Easton tries to adopt a sceptical position to the effect that political life has no ‘natural’ coherence so that we could, for argument’s sake, construct a political system out of the relationship between a duck-billed platypus and the ace of spades. But he does insist that a conceptually ‘interesting’ idea must have ‘empirical status’ (1965: 33, 44), and this seems to suggest that there must be something in the world out there which corresponds to the political system as he defines it. Such an institution is the state. Neither behaviouralists, nor linguistic theorists nor radicals argue that the state does not exist. If states do exist, then the challenge is surely to define them. Weber’s notion of the state as an institution that claims a monopoly of legitimate force for a particular territory is a useful definition: as we see it, it is rather silly to talk about the state and then deny that it can be defined.

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Force and Statelessness The value of highlighting force as the central attribute of the state is that it focuses upon a practice that is extraordinary: the use of force to tackle conflicts of interest. It is true that states defined in a Weberian way have been around for some 5,000 years, but humans have been in existence for much longer, and therefore an extremely interesting question arises. How did people secure order and resolve disputes before they had an institution claiming a monopoly of legitimate force? Most anthropologists would dispute Green’s argument that states have always existed. They argue that in tribal societies, political leaders rely upon moral pressures – ancestor cults, supernatural sanctions, the threat of exclusion – to maintain social cohesion and discipline. Although many of these sanctions would strike us today as being archaic and unworkable, the point about them is that they demonstrate that people can live without a state. International relations writers have also become aware of how international society regulates the activities of states themselves, without a super or world state to secure order. Moral and economic pressures have to be used to enforce international law, and as the recent conflict in Iraq has demonstrated, there is nothing to prevent states from interpreting international law in conflicting ways.

The Distinction between Force and Constraint, State and Government When we define the state in terms of force, we naturally are curious about the political mechanisms in societies without a state. But to understand how order is maintained in societies without institutions claiming a monopoly of legitimate force, we need to make two distinctions that are not usually made in political theory. The first is the distinction between force, on the one hand, and constraint, on the other, and the second (which we will come later) is the distinction between state and government. If stateless societies exert discipline without having an apparatus that can impose force, how do we characterise this discipline? In our view, it is necessary to distinguish between force and constraint. The two are invariably lumped together, particularly by classical liberal writers who often use the terms force and constraint synonymously. Yet the two are very different. Force imposes physical harm, and it should be remembered that mental illnesses like depression create physical pain so that causing depression counts as force. Coercion we take to be a credible threat of force: a two-year-old with a plastic gun cannot be said to coerce because the force ‘threatened’ is not credible. Thus, in the standard example of ‘your money or your life’ demand, what causes you to comply is the knowledge that force will be used against you if you do not. It is true that coercion can be defined in a much broader way. Here coercion is seen not as the threat of force, but as moral and social pressures that compel a person to do something that they otherwise would not have done. It is better, however, to describe these pressures as ‘constraints’: constraints certainly cause you to do something you would not have otherwise done, but these pressures do not involve force or the credible threat of force. Constraint may involve pressures that are unintentional and informal.

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Take the following example. You become religious and your agnostic and atheist friends no longer want to have coffee with you. You are cycling on a windy day and find that you have to pedal considerably harder! Constraints can be natural or social, and when moral judgements are made about a person’s behaviour, these constraints are ‘concentrated’ in ways that are often unpleasant. The point about these constraints, whatever form they take, is that they are impossible to avoid in a society. They do not undermine our capacity for choice. On the contrary, they are conditions that make choice both possible and necessary. This distinction between force and constraint translates into the second distinction we want to discuss, that between state and government. The latter two are not the same, even though in state-centred societies, it may be very difficult to disentangle them. The term ‘governance’ is often used but the argument is better expressed if we stick to the older term. Government, it could be argued, involves resolving conflicts of interest through sanctions which may be unpleasant but do not involve force. Families, schools, clubs and voluntary societies govern themselves with rules that pressure people into compliance but they do not use force. States on the other hand, do use force. It is true that states do not always act as states. In other words, they may in particular areas act ‘governmentally’, as we have defined it: in these areas they can be said to constrain, rather than resort to force. Of course in real life institutions in state-centred societies, these two dimensions are invariably mixed up. The NHS in Britain is a good example of an institution that is mostly governmental in that its rules do not have force attached to them, but rely upon social pressures – naming and shaming, embarrassing and using verbal sanctions – to enforce them. On the other hand, it cannot be said that the state (strictly defined) does not play a role as well. After all, the NHS is taxfunded, and if people refuse to pay taxes, they are likely to be subject to more than moral pressures to pay up!

The Argument So Far ... • We have argued that the state is not just a modern institution, even though the ‘modern state’ does have features that distinguish it from more traditional states. • We have defended Max Weber’s ‘force argument’. Although force is not the only attribute of the state, it is the central attribute so that the state is distinguished from other social institutions because it uses ‘legitimate force’ to address conflicts of interest. The police, the army and the prisons are the distinctive attributes of the state. • We have assumed that the state is an important concept in political theory, but there are those who argue that the state is too vague, elusive, divisive and ambiguous to merit attention. We have identified these critics as behaviouralists,

linguist analysts and radicals. Their arguments are rejected on the grounds that since states clearly exist in the real world, it is important to try and define them, however difficult this task might be. • States have not always existed. In fact throughout most of human history, people have resolved conflicts without relying upon a special institution that claims a monopoly of legitimate force. Even today states are (usually) bound by international law and treaties even though there is no world state to maintain order. These facts make it important that we distinguish between constraints of a diplomatic kind (relying upon economic pressures, self-interest, ostracism etc.) and force as such, just as we need to distinguish between the state and government.

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Exercise

State, Politics and Government Is there a case for distinguishing between politics and the state? List all the things in your life that you would call ‘political’ and see whether it can be said that the state is directly involved. It is sometimes argued that: • the family is political • the church is political • sport is political • relations between people are political. Do you agree, and if so, what makes these institutions political? How would you counter the argument that if ‘everything is political, then nothing is political’? Do you see government as a synonym for politics; is there a distinction between government and the state? List the institutions that have governments, starting with yourself (do you govern your own life?). Consider the following institutions: are they inherently statist in character, or could they be run without the state? • the National Health Service • the prisons • the post office • the army and police.

The distinction between state and government is important, first because it explains how stateless societies have rules and regulations which make order possible, and why people conform or dissent through pressures which most of the time are non-statist in character. You may try to get to the doctor’s on time – not because you are fearful of being arrested and put in prison – but because it seems discourteous and improper not to do so. The distinction separates force (or violence) – the terms seem to me to boil down to the same thing in this context – from human nature, pointing the fact that force comes into play only in situations in which moral and economic pressures do not work.

State and Sovereignty It is impossible to talk about the state without saying something about sovereignty. This is the aspect of the state that relates to its supreme and unchecked power. Hence sovereignty is commonly regarded as an attribute of states but here

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agreement ends, since some argue that only modern states are sovereign, while others that all states are sovereign. Does claiming a monopoly of legitimate force mean that this monopoly endows the state with sovereignty?

Sovereignty as a Modern Concept It is argued by Justin Rosenberg, for example, that sovereignty only arises when the state is sharply separated from society. His argument is that only under capitalism, do we have a sharp divide between the public and the private, and this divide is necessary before we can speak of the sovereign state (1994: 87). Rosenberg takes the view that sovereignty is a modern idea just as the state is a modern institution. F. H. Hinsley, on the other hand, argues that while the state can be broadly defined as a modern as well as an archaic institution, sovereignty cannot, since sovereignty requires a belief that absolute and illimitable power resides in the ‘body politic’ which constitutes a ‘single personality’ composed of rulers and ruled alike (1986: 125). This means effectively that rulers and ruled must be deemed ‘citizens’ – a modern concept. Even the celebrated theory of Jean Bodin’s (1529/30–1596), that sovereignty as unconditional and unrestrained power is, for Hinsley, undermined by the assumption that the holder of sovereignty is limited by divine and natural law. With Hobbes, however, law in all its forms is the creation of the sovereign, so that there is no distinction to be made between sovereign and subject. The sovereign is simply the individual writ large. In Hinsley’s view therefore, the state can take a pre-modern form but sovereignty cannot. This is also the position taken by Murray Forsyth in his entry on the state in The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought (Forsyth, 1987).

Sovereignty as a Broad Concept It is perfectly true that the concept of sovereignty was not known ‘in its fullness’ before the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Vincent, 1987: 32). Like the state, it was only explicitly formulated in the modern period, but that does not mean that it did not exist in earlier times. The Roman formulation – ‘whatever pleases the prince has the force of law’ – demonstrates not only that the notion of sovereignty existed in pre-modern periods, but that formulations like these clearly influenced the modern conception. The idea that God exercised sovereignty rather than secular rulers still expressed the notion of absolute and illimitable power, and although sovereignty was more chaotic in pre-modern times, it clearly existed. One writer has spoken of ‘the parcellized sovereignty’ of the medieval period (Hoffman, 1998: 35–6) so that those who define the state broadly, often define sovereignty broadly as well. Alan James argues that states have always been sovereign, and that sovereignty is best defined as constitutional independence: a sovereign state is a state that is legally in control of its own destiny (1986: 53). Although he is preoccupied with states in the modern world, the notion of sovereignty applies to all states, whether ancient, medieval or modern.

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Problems with the Theories of State Sovereignty Those who assume that sovereignty is about the power of the state are mistaken. They take the view that the state is capable of exercising absolute power whereas it has been argued that in fact the state only claims this sovereign power, because others – terrorists, criminals, etc. – challenge it. In other words, the state claims something that it does not and cannot have, so that the notion of the state as sovereign imports into the notion of sovereignty the problem of the state itself.

Difficulties with the Modernist Conception The idea that sovereignty is purely modern confuses formulation with institution. It is true that sovereignty is only explicitly formulated by modern writers, but the notion of supreme power is inherent in the state. The modernist notion misses the ironic part of Weber’s definition: that a monopoly can be claimed, not because it exists, but precisely because it does not. The sovereign state claims an absolute power that it does not and cannot have. Unless criminals and terrorists also exercise some of this ‘supremacy’, it cannot be claimed. In other words, the notion of sovereignty merely brings into the open the problem that has existed all along. Like the state itself, the idea of state sovereignty has severe logical difficulties associated with it. On the one hand, sovereignty is unitary in its scope. It is absolute and unlimited. In modern formulations, rulers and ruled are bonded together as citizens. On the other hand, there has to be a sharp division between the public and the private, the state and society, before modern sovereignty can be said to exist. There is a clear contradiction here since we can well ask, how can an institution have absolute power, and yet be clearly limited to a public sphere? Sovereignty allows the state to have a hand in everything – and yet we are told that it is confined to the public sphere and must not interfere in private matters! The formulation of state sovereignty in the modern period serves only to highlight its absurd and contradictory character. It is true that in ‘normal’ times the sovereign character of the state is not obvious to the members of a liberal society but if there is crisis or emergency – as when war breaks out between states – the capacity of the state to penetrate into all aspects of life, becomes plain. During the Second World War, the British state told its citizens what they must plant in their back gardens, and today, for example, the state tells us through advertising about safe sex, that we should conduct the most private of activities with adequate protection. The British Cabinet even had a discussion in the early 1980s about the importance of parents teaching children how to manage their pocket money (Guardian, 17/2/1983). We are told that state sovereignty needs to be limited and restricted. Yet it is clear from the practice of state even in ‘normal’ times, that sovereignty is seen as a power that can penetrate into the most private spheres of life.

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The Broad View of State Sovereignty Realists in international relations define sovereignty in terms of states, whether these states are ancient or modern, but it is not difficult to see that state sovereignty is a problematic concept, how ever the state is defined. James’s theory of state sovereignty is a case in point. James (1986) regards sovereignty as an attribute of any state, ancient or modern, and defines it as a state’s legal claim to constitutional independence. Sovereignty, James argues, is a formal attribute: a state is sovereign no matter how much it may in practice be beholden to the will of other states. However, his argument comes to grief over the question of identifying sovereignty in situations when it is explicitly contested. James contends that sovereignty expresses a legal, not a physical reality. Yet this position is contradicted by the position he takes on Rhodesia (today, Zimbabwe). In 1965 Ian Smith, a right wing white Rhodesian leader, declared a ‘unilateral declaration of independence’ to prevent Britain from pushing the country into some kind of majority rule. However, James argues that the Smith regime was a sovereign state, even though it came about in what he concedes was an unlawful manner. What is the basis for arguing that Smith rebel regime was sovereign? Because, James tells us, it was able to keep its enemies at bay – to defend itself through force of arms. This implies that it is not legality that ultimately counts but physical effectiveness. In another of James’s examples, he argues that the country Biafra (which broke away from Federal Nigeria in the late 1960s) did not become a sovereign state because it was defeated by the superior strength of the federal state of Nigeria (after a long and bloody civil war). James makes it clear that sovereignty is ultimately the capacity of a state to impose its will through force. But if this is what sovereignty is, then it suffers from the same problem that afflicts states in general: the problem of asserting a monopoly that it does not have. James speaks of sovereignty as a statist effectiveness that rests upon ‘a significant congruence between the decisions of those who purport to rule and the actual behaviour of their alleged subjects’ (Hoffman, 1998: 27–9). But this congruence, in the case of Smith’s Rhodesia – a state that only lasted 14 years – was met with massive resistance from those who challenged this sovereignty and sought to achieve a sovereignty of their own. In other words, the supposedly absolute and illimitable will is shared with wills that have a power of their own. State sovereignty is as illogical and problematic as the state itself.

Rescuing the Idea of Sovereignty The idea of sovereignty is too important to be chewed to pieces by those who embrace the concept of the state uncritically. We will suggest a way in which the notion can be reinstated without the problems that inhere in the state. The classical liberals saw individuals as sovereign, and they were right to do so. The problem with classical liberals is that they assumed that individuals could enjoy their supreme power in complete isolation from one another, and indeed, for this reason, depicted individuals as living initially in a ‘natural’ condition outside

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of society. This assumption runs contrary to everything we know about individuals. The individual who has not been ‘socialised’ cannot speak or think, and certainly cannot identify themself as an individual! Individuals acquire their identity through their relations with others – they are social beings. Our life develops through an infinity of relationships – with parents, friends, teachers, and more abstractly, with people we read about or see and hear on the media. Sovereignty is an attribute which individuals enjoy, and which enables us to govern our own lives. This definition frees sovereignty from the problems that blight it when it is linked to the state. Not only is the search for self-government developed in our relations with others, but it involves an infinite capacity to order our own lives. We aspire to sovereignty, but we never reach a situation in which we can say that no further progress towards sovereignty is possible. The fact that sovereignty is individual does not mean that it is not organisational, for individuals work in multiple associations at every level – the local, regional, national and global. Each of these helps us to develop our sovereignty – our capacity to govern our lives. Ironically, therefore, the idea of state sovereignty gets in the way of individual sovereignty as we see from the way in which states often resist demands for the implementation of human rights on the grounds that they, states, should be entitled to treat their inhabitants as they see fit. The Chinese authorities object when their policies are criticised, and the American administration considers that it is entitled to continue incarcerating prisoners in Guantanemo Bay. When we define sovereignty as self-government, we place the rights of humans above the power of the state, and argue that only by locating sovereignty in the individual can it become consistent and defensible as a concept.

Moving to a Stateless World Why are most people so sceptical about the possibility of a world without the state? Part of the reason, it could be argued, is that people think of government as the same as the state, but if we make a sharp distinction (as we have above) between government and the state, then it can be seen that a stateless society is not a society without government, but rather a society in which an institution claiming a monopoly of legitimate force becomes redundant. What prevents this from happening? People, it seems to us, can settle their conflicts of interest through moral and social pressures where they have a common interest with their opponents: when they can, in other words, imagine what it is like to be ‘the other’. This does not mean that people have to be the same in every regard. On the contrary, people are all different, and these differences are the source of conflict. Still it does not follow that because people are different and have conflicting interests, they cannot negotiate and compromise in settling these conflicts. It is only when they cannot do this that force becomes inevitable, and even if this force begins outside the state, the state will soon be involved, since the state claims a monopoly of legitimate force, and is concerned (quite rightly) about the force of private individuals. We are not, therefore, suggesting that we should not have a state in situations where people resort to force to tackle their conflicts. However, instead of taking this force for granted, as though it was part and parcel of ‘human nature’ (as Hobbes does), it could be argued that force arises

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where people lack what we have called common interests. Policies that cement and reinforce common interests help to make government work. There is a case for resorting to force where this is the only way of implementing policies that will strengthen common interests. The debate around the war in Iraq revolved around the question as to whether the use of force, in the form of a war, was the only way to defeat Saddam Hussein’s regime, and whether the use of force could lead to a democratic reconstruction of the country. It is true that force can never really be legitimate since it necessarily deprives those whom it targets of their freedom, but it can be justifiably used if it is the only way to provide a breathing space for policies that will cement common interests. For example, it could prove impossible to involve residents in running their own lives on a rundown housing estate, until force has been used to stop gangs from intimidating ordinary people. In early tribal societies, conflicts of interest were settled through moral and social pressures. This historical reality is a huge resource for pursuing the argument that it is possible to find ways of bringing about order that dispense altogether with the use of the state. Max Weber’s definition has implications that he himself did not see. When he read that Leon Trotsky had said that ‘every state is founded on force’, he commented ‘That indeed is right’ (Gerth and Wright Mills, 1991: 78). But in making this endorsement, Weber had not committed himself to Trotsky’s Marxist analysis of politics. In the same way, we find Weber’s definition immensely useful, even though we see implications in the definition of which Weber himself would not have approved. Moreover, it is not only tribal societies in the dim and distant past that were stateless. It is now over two decades since Hedley Bull (1977) noted the ‘awkward facts’ confronting a state-centric view of the world. These awkward facts embrace: • the increasing importance of international law as a body of rules which has no wider monopoly of legitimate force to impose it; • the globalisation of the economy which makes the notion of autonomous state sovereignty peculiarly archaic, • and a growing number of issues - Bull mentioned the environment in particular – which can only be settled through acknowledging the common interests of contending parties. This is why Bull characterised the international order as an ‘anarchical society’, and it is clear that developments of the kind noted above mean that statist solutions are becoming ever more dangerous as a mode of resolving conflicts. The increasing degree of interdependence that characterises both domestic and international society makes the resort to force (the chosen and distinctive instrument of the state) increasingly counterproductive. The fact that criminal individuals like criminal states are also the beneficiaries of a technology of violence (whose sophistication escalates all the time) means that if we want a secure future, it is vital that we learn how to settle differences without the use of force i.e. in a stateless manner. As we will demonstrate in a later chapter, anarchists also wish to do away with the state, but they seek to abolish it rather than see it wither away, and they usually reject the kind of distinctions that appear in this chapter - the distinction between state and government, force and constraint.

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Focus

The State The state is often identified with civilisation, and it is easy to see why the state has such a profound impact upon our thought. Conventional religion depicts God as a sovereign overlord, and classical political thinkers like Hobbes and Rousseau assumed that without a conception of God, no state would be possible. It is also very tempting to translate contemporary concerns into a frozen notion of human nature as though how people behave in, for example, Britain today, represents the nature of humankind. Moreover, where people do resort to force to tackle their conflicts, a world without the state makes a bad situation even worse, and it would hardly be an advantage to do away with the state, if the alternative was rule by warlords or the Mafia. Yet it is ultimately an illusion to think that we can do away with force by resorting to the state, for what could be called a ‘statist’ mentality assumes that violent people are inexplicably evil. We cannot understand them; we can only crush them. The statist mentality never asks the question ‘why’. Why are people so brutalised that they resort to force? Of course, it is no help to merely invert the idea that people are evil so that we consider them to be naturally ‘good’ instead. Pacifists naively suppose that brutalised people or states will respond to moral pressures in a purely moral way, and anarchists fail to see that in conditions where force can be dispensed with, we still need government to regulate social affairs. Firmness and rules are actually undermined by the use of force, since force encourages us to ignore complexities and not try and imagine what it is like to be in the shoes of another. The fact that the state remains hugely influential in our lives does not mean that we should not start thinking about ways and means of living without it.

Globalisation and the State Hyper-globalists are those who argue that the notion of the nation-state disappears under the cut and thrust of the free market. They are called hyper-globalists (by their critics) because it is felt that they take a naive and extreme view of the growing internationalisation of the economy and society. Take the arguments of Kenneth Ohmae, for example. Ohmae argues that that the nation-state has become ‘a nostalgic fiction’ (1995: 12) in the face of the global market. Ohmae rests his case on what he calls the ‘Californisation’ of taste and preference. There is a ladder of economic development, he contends, upon which more and more societies climb, reaching the US $5000 threshold of per capita development. The spread of information-related technology is infectious and Adam Smith’s invisible hand now works in a global context. This is a neoliberal or free-market argument which is starkly inegalitarian and is hostile to democracy. Ohmae argues that the rules of electoral logic and popular expectations lead to general, indirect long-term benefits being sacrificed in favour of immediate, tangible and focused pay-offs (1995: 42). The tyranny of modern democracy, as he calls it, seeks an equality of results, not of contributions (1995: 53). What he refers to as the ‘civil minimum’ is like a drug and takes the form of

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broad-based social programmes, welfare, unemployment compensation, public education, old-age pensions and health insurance. Established political systems have become the creature of special interests and the poorer districts. Whereas the nation-state solution assumes a zero-sum game for limited resources, the region state model, he argues, open to the global economy, is a ‘plus sum’ as prosperity is brought in from without (Ohmae, 1995: 55, 57, 62). Yet Ohmae notes that huge disparities have opened up – disparities measured by a factor of 20 or more – between inland and coastal regions in countries like China. He concedes that the gap between the developed and developing world has substantially widened. Despite his defence of the ‘trickle-down’ effect – that the poor ultimately benefit from the prosperity of the rich – he is not only hostile to democracy, but his argument is basically state-centric throughout. States are seen as having an unproblematic sovereignty, the European Union is described as a ‘supernation state’, and those worried about the most economically backward areas of the world are regarded as defending ‘vested interests’ that get in the way of global logic. Besides, regional states are seen as states that constitute ‘natural economic zones’ (1995: 80). It is clear that if so-called globalisation aggravates and deepens inequalities in the world, then this will generate wars, fundamentalism and, of course, the need for states. John Gray takes the view that economic liberalisation and religious fundamentalism go together (1998: 103). Globalisation can only weaken the state if it cements common interests and allows conflicts of interest to be subject to governmental sanctions.

The Case for Global Government If globalisation is to be positively conceived – as an opportunity rather than as a source of violence and division – then it is crucial that we see free market fundamentalism and the abstract similarity that it seeks to impose as a distortion of globalisation. If by globalisation we mean a sense of interconnectedness between the peoples of the world, then we must distinguish between this and ‘Americanisation’ which inevitably creates a fundamentalist reaction. Globalisation is a cultural and political as well as an economic phenomenon. It is not simply that states are losing economic power: their claim to impose a monopolistic outlook is being more and more openly challenged both within and between societies. We need to be clear that the case for global government is not a case for a global state. If we are moving, as Barry Jones supposes, to a world of ‘complex, multi-layered’ public governance (2000: 270), then it is crucial that we challenge the view that diversity is the same as fragmentation. States will remain for the foreseeable future, and the case for global government is one in which states become less important and increasingly devote their energies to governmental activities, thus gradually transcending themselves. The problem with Kant’s argument for perpetual peace is that it rests upon a liberal republican notion of a federation of states – whereas what is required is the development of global identities that go beyond the state. It is important not only to democratise the United Nations (UN), but in so doing to challenge the arguments of those who see the UN Charter as bestowing a kind

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of state sovereignty on the security and general council. International law is already a stateless law, and it is vital to strengthen the common interest that makes it enforceable. The problem is that the UN is an organisation with two souls. The one is certainly globalist in scope since the Preamble to the Charter refers the existence of universal human rights and Article 1 speaks of the universal peace for the peoples of the world based on self-determination. Article 2, however, speaks of sovereign equality for member states with Article 2 (7) declaring that no intervention is allowed in the domestic jurisdiction of any state. Many have sought unsuccessfully to tackle the unrepresentative character of the Security Council. Pressure needs to grow on the UN to boost its peacekeeping role and its post-statal activities where the plight of children, the spread of disease and problems of development are tackled imaginatively and effectively. In the same way, the European Union has two souls – the market and democracy. The one can be particularist and short-termist, but the other is empowering and has tremendous potential – as in the concept of European citizenship that offers a wider identity, not in competition with but as a supplement to, state identity. A global civil society is also developing around non-governmental organisations (NGOs), which could be better called non-statist organisations, given the fact that NGOs within and between countries act in ways that help to cement common interests. NGOs like the World Wildlife Fund, Amnesty International, OXFAM, Human Rights Watch and Christian Aid support a concept of order that stresses resource provision rather than military action. Organisations like Amnesty International confront national governments with transgressions of the UN Charter. It is true that some of the 29,000 NGOs suffer from problems of bureaucracy and authoritarianism, but they are becoming increasingly influential and they do represent proof that organisations can tackle problems without claiming to exercise a monopoly of legitimate force. They are no substitute for coordinated, collective global action to tackle the problem of global inequality but they do make a significant practical and theoretical contribution to the question of global government. Globalisation has demonstrated that humans face problems of a global kind and that global institutions have to be forged which, in conjunction with local, regional and national governments, are able to contribute positively to a world that recognises difference, but works against division.

Summary The state is seen by some theorists as a modern institution that has, as its identifying features, a sharp separation of the public from the private; a capacity to exercise sovereignty throughout its domain and protect all who live in its territory; an ability to organise its offices along bureaucratic rather than patrimonial lines, and to extract tax revenues from its population. The state can be defined in a way that sees its central attribute as the exercise of legitimate force; is based upon morality, or a mixture of the two. When it is

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defined in a way that stresses the importance of force, then it can be argued that modern states are crucially different from pre-modern states, but like all states, they claim to exercise a monopoly of legitimate force. Three bodies of argument contend that politics is best identified without using the concept of the state. Behaviouralists argue that the state as a concept is too ambiguous and ideological to be useful, and the notion of a political system is preferable; linguistic analysts see the idea of the state as a practical institution rather than a coherent philosophical concept, while radicals argue that the notion of the state gets in the way of a pluralist and participatory politics. The problem, however, is that the state does not simply disappear simply because it is not defined. The contradictory nature of the institution can only be exposed if we define it, and the definition of the state as an institution claiming a monopoly of legitimate force makes it possible to underline the state’s problematic character. The contradictory character of the state also undermines the notion of state sovereignty. Sovereignty can only be coherently defined as the capacity of individuals to govern their own lives. Globalisation is only positive if it recognises differences between countries, and works to reduce disparities so that the development of a global government becomes a realistic possibility.

Questions 1. Do you agree with the argument that the state is essentially a modern institution? 2. What is the best way of defining the state? 3. Is it possible to differentiate government from the state, and if so, how? 4. Do you see the notion of state sovereignty as irrelevant in the contemporary world? 5. Why do people physically harm one another?

References Allen, J. (1990) ‘Does Feminism Need a Theory of the State?’ in S. Watson (ed.), Playing the state London: Verso, 21–37. Ashley, R. (1988) ‘Untying the Sovereign State: a Double Reading of the Anarchy Problematique’, Millenium 17 (2), 227–62. Barry Jones, R. (2000) The World Turned Upside Down Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Bentley, A. (1967) The Process of Government Cambridge, MA: Belknap, Harvard University Press. Bull, H. (1977) The Anarchical Society Basingstoke: Macmillan. Dahl, R. (1976) Modern Political Analysis 3rd edn, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Dunleavy, P. and O’Leary, B. (1987) Theories of the State London and Basingstoke, Macmillan. Easton, D. (1965) A Framework for Political Analysis Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Easton, D. (1971) The Political System 2nd edn, New York: Alfred Knopf.

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Easton D. (1981) ‘The Political System Besieged by the State’ Political Theory 9, 203–25. Easton, D. (1990) An Analysis of Political Structure New York and London: Routledge. Forsyth, M. (1987) ‘The State’ in D. Miller (ed.), The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Modern Thought Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 503–6. Gerth, H. and Wright Mills, C. (1991) From Max Weber London: Routledge. Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks London: Lawrence and Wishart. Gray J. (1998) False Dawn London: Granta. Green, T.H. (1941) The Principles of Political Obligation London, New York and Toronto: Longmans, Green & Co. Hamlin, A. and Pettit, P. (1989) ‘The Normative Analysis of the State: Some Preliminaries’ in A. Hamlin and P. Pettit, eds, The Good Polity Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1–13. Hegel, G. (1956) The Philosophy of History New York: Dover. Hinsley, F.H. (1986) Sovereignty Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hoffman, J. (1995) Beyond the State Cambridge: Polity Press. Hoffman, J. (1996) ‘Antonio Gramsci: The Prison Notebooks’ in M. Forsyth and M. KeensSoper, eds, The Political Classics: Green to Dworkin Oxford: Oxford University Press, 58–77. Hoffman, J. (1998) Sovereignty Buckingham: Open University Press. James, A. (1986) Sovereign Statehood London: Allen and Unwin. Machiavelli, N. (1998) The Prince Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mann, M. (1980) ‘The Pre-industrial State’, Political Studies 28, 297–304. Marx K. and Engels, F. (1976) Collected Works Vol. 5, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Ohmae, K. (1995) The End of the Nation-State New York: Free Press Pringle, R. and Watson, S. (1992) ‘Women’s Interests and the Post-Structural State’ in M. Barrett and A. Phillips, eds, Destabilizing Theory Cambridge: Polity Press, 53–73. Rosenberg, J. (1994) The Empire of Civil Society London: Verso. Vincent, A. (1987) Theories of the State Oxford: Blackwell. Weldon, T. (1953) The Vocabulary of Politics Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Further Reading • Bhikhu Parekh’s essay on the withering away of the state (referenced above) is a thoughtful and accessible presentation on the state as a modern institution. • John Hoffman’s Beyond the state (referenced above) deals with the way in which different traditions have approached the state, and makes the case for the kind of conceptual distinctions need to provide an effective critique. • Alan James Sovereign Statehood (referenced above) provides a clear defence of a traditional view of sovereignty with an attempt to sort out the confusions that the concept generates. • David Easton’s The Political System (referenced above) makes the classic case against the state and the need to conceptualize politics as a system rather than a set of institutions. • Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society (referenced above) seeks to argue that international society is a stateless order and yet there is order. An ingenious and extremely interesting text. • Bernard Crick’s In Defence of Politics Harmondworth: Penguin 1964 (and subsequent editions) offers a very interesting first chapter on the nature of political rule, and what he sees as distinctive about the political process.

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• Adrian Leftwich’s edited volume, What is Politics? Cambridge: Polity, 2004 (2nd edition) contains a very useful and thought-provoking chapter 3 on the question of ‘Politics and Force’ by Peter Nicholson. • Colin Hay, Michael Lister and David Marsh have edited a most useful volume, The State Basingstoke: Palgrave, Chapter 9 by David Marsh, Nicola Smith and Nicola Hothi is entitled ‘Globalization and the State’.

Weblinks http://www.keele.ac.uk/depts/po/prs.htm http://www.york.ac.uk/services/library/subjects/politint.htm